What you need is.
-*- A black or white cloth and the size depends on what you want to photograph.
-*- Some Lights.
-*- Cardboard
-*- ALuminium foil.
As you can see these items are not hard to come by and most of us have them in our house already. SO the first thing we need to do is make the stuff that we need. Get out your cardbord. This will be used as a reflector. Now get some aluminum foil that is a bit bigger than than the size of your cardboard and wrinkle it. Now tape it onto the carboard box. MAke sure not to tape it to tight because youll want room to bend it later.
Now you have a reflector. make as many as you think you might need.
Now you can start setting up your studio. spread the cloth as wide you can and you may want to iron it a bit to make the wrinkles less. When you do this think about from what angle your going to be photographing your person or item. Your going to want the thing to have a white background around the whole thing if you know what i mean. Like if your photographing a person you dont want to have half of the head not have the canvas behind it or its not going to work.
Now set up the person or object your going to be photographing( from now on ill only say person. if your going to be photographing some object just replace person with object or somehting like that to make the sentence make sence.) Set some lights up around the person and move them around till you find a lighting that you like. If you only have one light you can use the reflectors to light up some area that cant really be lighted with the light from where it is by using it a bit like a mirrow to shine some like from a lamp to the person.
If your shooting in dark lighting i suggest a tripod so you dont get a blurry image.
Now after you get some pics thats your happy with upload them to your computer or another picture editing program. Remember the screen doent have to be black all over. just around the thing that you photographed. I'll be continueing from now in for photoshop but just read it if you have a diffrent program and find the menu things that have the same stuff( does that make sense? )
Make a new Levels Adjustment Layer. Layers --> New Adjustmentlayer --> Levels. Now click on a thing that says Set Black Point. Click around on the black cloth till you get the blackness as you like it. If you photographed using a white cloth or somehting like that.use the Set White Point and click around on the white till you get the result you want.
Now i suggest using NeatImage to make the image look less noisy or using a black brush to just wipe everything black.
Hope this tutorial has helped some poeple and will animate you to take some photographs.
Over and Out,
Lucas
This is also the way big budgetted films work on their stunts and flying animations.
